Over the last ten years, Hollywood has clearly figured out how to make big-screen superheroes
work, putting together incredibly successful adaptations of characters and worlds that
comic fans love.
Before that, though, well, let’s just call it trial and error.
The path to the MCU is littered with strange efforts that have gone mostly forgotten since
they were originally released.
Here are the bizarre Marvel TV shows you've probably never seen.
Generation X (1996)
In an era when the X-Men franchise has a sprawling series of movies and TV hits like The Gifted
and Legion, it's hard to believe that there was a time in which Marvel’s mutants weren’t
a sure thing.
In the ‘90s, the core team was thriving in comics and ruling Saturday mornings with
a long-running animated series, and a spin-off called Generation X featured a younger cast
of heroes, still learning the ropes.
In a time before Buffy the Vampire Slayer hit airwaves with a supernatural spin on a
similar idea, Generation X sounds like the perfect way to bring Marvel’s edgy '90s
teen drama to television.
It wasn't.
Filmed as a pilot and aired as a TV movie, Generation X is a hallucinogenic nightmare,
and not the good kind.
The production value is insanely low, the acting is lousy, and somehow it doesn't even
manage to be entertainingly bad.
Instead, it’s mostly just a reminder of how lucky we are to have better stuff today.
Silver Surfer (1998)
In the ‘90s, Marvel had huge success with cartoons like X-Men and Spider-Man, but there
were plenty of other attempts at an animated Marvel Universe that ended after a single
season.
1998’s Silver Surfer animated series, however, could’ve been remembered as one of the best.
The Surfer is an inherently weird character, a "cosmic sentinel" whose stories are often
rife with themes of existentialism and philosophical struggle.
Rather than tone it down for the show and turn it into a simple beat-'em-up about good
guys and bad guys, the animators leaned into it with episodes about imperialism, slavery,
and nihilism.
It also incorporated some of the strangest characters the cosmic side of the Marvel universe
has to offer, including Gamora, Uatu the Watcher, Eternity, and even Thanos.
The art style was interesting, too, with imperfect but charming CGI that looks looks like it's
ripped straight from the pages of a Jack Kirby comic.
Unfortunately, a legal dispute between Marvel and Saban the production company, led to the
show's cancellation after a single season.
It’s a shame, too - while it was one of the strangest Marvel shows of all time, it
was also one of the most interesting.
The Avengers: United They Stand (1999)
Looking back from a time when they’re in the most popular movies ever made, it’s
hard to imagine a show about the Avengers being so unpopular that it was canceled after
a single season.
If you’ve ever seen Avengers: United They Stand, however, you’ll understand exactly
why it got the axe.
Rather than including popular heavy hitters like Thor, Captain America, and Iron Man,
the show was populated by heroes that were B-listers at best.
We're not knocking great characters like Hawkeye and the Falcon, but Tigra and the Swordsman
aren't exactly the biggest names Marvel had to offer.
On the other hand, topping that team off with a genuine stinker of a character in Wonder
Man is a recipe for disaster, and giving everyone clunky, toyetic designs rather than their
iconic comic book costumes wasn’t a help, either.
Yikes.
Blade: The Series (2006)
Let’s give credit where it’s due: Blade effectively kickstarted the modern superhero
movie, and Blade II still holds up as one of the best the genre has to offer.
We’ll admit that Blade: Trinity might be an imperfect conclusion to the trilogy, but
overall, Blade rules.
With that in mind, it’s no surprise that in 2006, Spike TV began developing a series
continuing the adventures of the legendary "daywalker."
Unfortunately, the show lacked the budget, production values, and star power of the big-screen
version.
Wesley Snipes was absent, replaced by Sticky Fingaz of the rap group Onyx, and none of
the other actors from the films appeared in the series, either.
It never quite felt like the Blade of the movies, and ran for one very strange season
but before it ultimately got staked through the heart after 13 episodes.
Supaidaman (1978-1979)
There's an undeniable charm to Japanese tokusatsu shows.
The genre has a long tradition in Japan of colorful costumed heroes fighting grotesque
monsters and giant robots, and America has been importing it for decades now in the form
of the long-running Power Rangers franchise.
All the more interesting, though, is the time the reverse happened and Japan brought an
American hero to a tokusatsu show.
As part of a licensing agreement, Toei, the leading producer of tokusatsu in Japan, made
a show loosely based on Spider-Man in the late ‘70s.
Often transliterated as Supaidaman to distinguish it from the original, Japan’s take resembles
its source material in name and costume only.
Instead of Peter Parker, this Spidey is Takuya Yamashiro, a daring motorcycle racer who got
his powers come from the blood of a dying alien from Planet Spider.
He's tasked with fighting a sinister interstellar force called the Iron Cross Army, led by the
evil Professor Monster.
Oh, and Spidey's got a giant robot called Leopardon.
Supaidaman is all kinds of awesome if you're into tokusatsu, and also super-weird thanks
to scenes where Supaidaman introduces himself as an Emissary from Hell, or shoots at people
with a machine gun.
But he also has a place in toku history: he was the first live-action to introduce a hero
summoning a giant robot, which would become a mainstay in Super Sentai and Power Rangers
afterwards.
Night Man (1997-1999)
The “Ultraverse” line is a pretty odd slice of '90s comics.
These original superhero comics were published by a company called Malibu, which was acquired
by Marvel in 1994 - but not before a few of their heroes had been optioned for mass media.
Along with a short-lived animated series about a team called Ultraforce that was half-satire
and half-ripoff of the far more successful X-Men, the major result was Night Man, which
ranks among the most peculiar superhero shows of all time.
The series focuses on a buff jazz saxophonist who develops the telepathic ability to detect
evil after being struck by lightning, at the cost of never being able to sleep.
With eight hours of his day freed up, he creates a super-suit and starts fighting crime.
At night.
That last part is probably obvious.
It's a stretch of a premise to begin with, and coupling it with laughable production
values makes for a pretty freakish show.
Somehow, it managed to last for two seasons, and reeled in guest stars like Jerry Springer
and Donald Trump.
A slice of pure '90s weirdness, Night Man is mostly forgotten, but give the opening
credits one watch, and we promise it's all you're going to think about for a week.
Mutant X (2001 - 2004)
Mutant X is the product of poor circumstance.
To make a long story short, Marvel sold the film and TV rights for the X-Men to 20th Century
Fox.
Years later, Marvel Studios producer Avi Arad pushed Mutant X into production and was promptly
sued by Fox for violating their agreement by putting X-Men characters in a TV show Fox
didn’t produce, which was a pretty big deal after the success of the first X-Men movie.
Because of this, changes were applied to distance Mutant X from its source material, resulting
in a genuinely bizarre show that's not quite an X-Men show but not quite not.
The show is about a group of mutants who gained their powers through a government experiment.
The show follows them while they're on the run, and being kept safe by one of the scientists
that helped create them.
The characters were unrelated to the X-Men, none of them were allowed to have superheroic
codenames, and the only real resemblance to the real X-Men is the presence of mutants,
and the team's mission is to find other mutants and help keep them safe.
Despite its general weirdness, the show ran for three seasons before its production company
folded.